Rethinking the Penal State - by Loïc Wacquant (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc Wacquant combines social theory, comparative history and structural ethnography to probe criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he captures the constitutive duality of punishment, at once material and symbolic, an instrument of class control and a means of communicating values, endlessly oscillating between rehabilitation and retribution.

Ranging from the birth of the workhouse prison in sixteenth-century Europe to the deployment of punishment in the colonies to the workaday world of prosecutors in a California criminal court, Wacquant reveals how the penal state curates crime, manages urban marginality, signals sovereignty, and manufactures legitimacy in the eyes of the population by restoring control over bodies out of order. But the penal Leviathan is a bifurcated state which captures nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonored categories by targeting their neighborhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and a race-forging institution based on the stubborn differentiation of "paper penality" and "street penality."

Getting inside the machinery of criminal justice shows that punishment must be placed at the epicenter of the political sociology of statecraft, group-making and place-making in the metropolis as well as brought to the forefront of civic debate to articulate a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic ideals.

Review Quotes

"Rethinking the Penal State is a breath of fresh air and sure to become a major reference point in the study of punishment. It demonstrates that punishment is central not only to statecraft, but to producing citizenship. It is must-read for students, scholars, and policymakers interested in why and how democratic societies remain on the cusp of justice rather than realizing it."
Vanessa Barker, author of Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order

"Wacquant paints on canvas that is as wide as the global history of penal forms and as precise and detailed as the best ethnographies. Easily one of the most important contributions to the theory of punishment and society in the twenty-first century."
Jonathan Simon, author of Mass Incarceration on Trial

About the Author

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique, Paris.